So what really happened to 'How I Met Your Dad'?

One of the benefits of hitting the Toronto Film Festival is you get to run into some of your favorite people — in the unlikeliest of places.

"I saw you on my plane!" Greta Gerwig told us, settling in with Al Pacino to talk about her latest indie, The Humbling (in which she plays a young woman who epically shouts Pacino down, which takes ... guts).

Naturally, we detoured for a few minutes to talk about the once-championed and quickly discarded TV pilot How I Met Your Dad, which was supposed to be a Gerwig vehicle spinning off the ever-popular How I Met Your Mother. So what happened to that, anyway?
"They didn’t want it!" said Gerwig. "I liked the guys who made the show and I was going to write on it and they were going to move it to New York. I was like, ‘I can’t say no, this is amazing!’ And then it just didn’t happen. I don’t know the rhyme or reason to these things. It just didn’t work out."
But Gerwig is just fine post-short-lived TV career. "This is probably going to sound completely depressing and pessimistic," the Frances Ha star continued, "but I get more anxiety when things are going really well, because you know there’s the other side of it. I anticipate the other side of it. But when things go badly or things don’t work out, for some reason that’s where I find my next bounce."

That bounce includes bossing Al Pacino around as her lover in The Humbling. “It was horrible!” she laughs. “We did a lot of improv."

Pacino leans in: “We didn’t even know each other.”